


when thoughts keep drifting (as walls keep shifting)

by plutosrose



Series: bonded [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Sentinels & Guides, Alternate Universe - Sentinels & Guides Are Known, M/M, Non-consensual surgery mention, Sensory Overload, Winter Soldier Torture Mention, memory problems
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-13 00:32:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29518131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plutosrose/pseuds/plutosrose
Summary: Bucky considered this for a moment. “Sometimes I miss things too.”“Like what?”“Things like...having a home. Things. I don’t know. They don’t always have names.”Steve smiled a little in the darkness. “Yeah, me too.”
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: bonded [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2034616
Comments: 4
Kudos: 40
Collections: Stucky Bingo 2020





	when thoughts keep drifting (as walls keep shifting)

**Author's Note:**

> Catch me on Tumblr at [plutosrose](https://plutosrose.tumblr.com/). I'm also officially on Twitter at [@plutosrose1](https://twitter.com/plutosrose1/)
> 
> title is from House of Leaves

The reds and oranges and browns of the explosion were blinding. Steve’s vision had gotten so overwhelmed with details that he waved a hand in front of his face, trying to force himself to see again. 

“Come on,” Bucky murmured, reaching out to pull him by the arm away from the square. “We have to move.”

Steve wasn’t going to debate that--Natasha was most likely alive, judging by the fact that the men had bothered to drag her away. But, there was no telling whether her contact had other associates that were just waiting to catch up with them. 

The colors of the houses that Bucky pulled him past almost seemed to melt - lime greens, pastel pinks, and burnt oranges swirling together. It reminded him of the times as a child when he’d mixed paints together - though in that case, the color was usually a muddy, mossy brown, not separate and blinding. 

In the distance, he could hear screams and blaring sirens. “Bucky,” he murmured, though his senses were so scrambled he could have been shouting for all he knew. “Bucky, I--”

Bucky clamped a hand over his mouth, and dragged him back onto a narrow side street. “You’re talking way too much,” Bucky grumbled, his arm looped through Steve’s.

Being so close to Bucky during the war had usually had a calming and focusing effect on him, but now, his instinct after the explosion was right, he thought. Bucky was different. 

The thought almost made him want to laugh. Of course Bucky was different. He was different too. They had to be different to have been able to survive for seventy years after both of them should have been in the ground. 

Bucky led him up a set of rickety metal stairs and into a small apartment. The apartment itself was practically empty, a backpack in the corner that was stuffed full and practically bursting at the seams, as though he expected to be able to need to leave at a moment’s notice. 

“Sit.” It wasn’t an offer--it was a command. Bucky pushed him back into a worn armchair in the corner of the room. Bucky didn’t need to be as forceful as he was--it felt like the world was swimming before Steve’s eyes. The last thing that he wanted to do at the moment was try to walk around on his own. 

He knew the broad strokes of what had happened to Bucky. He wasn’t sure that he would have been able to forget the photographs that Natasha showed him even if he tried--bodies twisted and bleeding, Bucky in the distance, always in the distance, part of some private war. 

But it was different to be staring at the Bucky of the past, and the Bucky of the present. Present Bucky had hair that was equally as long as the Bucky in the photos, but he seemed exhausted. Almost...lifeless. The Bucky in the photos was a ruthless enforcer, but this Bucky, this Bucky seemed like he was trying to hide under his large sweatshirt, eyes darting around and never staying focused for more than a couple of seconds. 

“Bucky,” Steve breathed, meeting his gaze. “What happened?” 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bucky croaked, looking away. He turned and started to wash the dishes in the sink, which made Steve raise an eyebrow. This was classic Bucky behavior when he was trying to avoid a fight. 

Steve got up out of the armchair, feeling a little unsteady as his vision continued to swim before his eyes. He staggered over to the sink, reached over, and turned off the faucet. “I think I deserve a few answers, Buck, after what happened back there.” 

Bucky, for the briefest second, looked contrite and angry. And then, nothing.

“They did something to me.”

“Who’s they?”

“Hydra.” 

Steve could feel his heart in his throat. He remembered finding Bucky at Azzano, delirious and glassy-eyed, murmuring his ID number over and over like a prayer. He remembered feeling the poison pulsing throughout Bucky’s body. “You told me--” he started, before Bucky drew his jaw into a tight and cruel line.

“I don’t remember what I told you,” Bucky said sharply. “I don’t remember...I don’t remember _so_ much.” 

Steve squinted, and he was able to make out the stacks of journals that were _everywhere_ in the apartment, stacked by the sink, stacked on the kitchen table, by the armchair, and peeking out from under the mattress on the floor. He felt his chest clench at the idea of Bucky scribbling down details-- _newsreels_ , _great depression_ , _war_ and crossing out the things that didn’t make sense to him. 

He could imagine Bucky sitting with a pen in his hand, realizing that he had sisters and desperately trying to remember their names. 

“There’s too much…” Bucky started. “There’s too many details in my brain, it makes it hard to think sometimes.” 

Steve pursed his lips as he considered this. “Bucky, I think...I think they might have given you the serum they gave me.” Or a version of it, anyway. His frown deepened as he remembered the sound of the bullet firing from the gun when Erksine had been killed.

Bucky rounded on him, glaring at him dangerously. Steve took a couple of clumsy steps backward. 

“You know me,” Steve said cautiously, raising his hands to show that he didn’t mean any harm. “You know me, Bucky.” 

Bucky parted his hair then showing ugly-looking scars just at his hairline. Steve was already unsteady on his feet, but now he felt like he was about to fall backward--both out of shock and out of some desire to try and pray for them to be able to go back in time. For none of this to happen. For this goddamn nightmare to be able to end. 

“I don’t remember much of fucking anything,” Bucky said, venom in his tone as he let his hair fall back into place. “There was an accident. Then they rooted around in my brain. A lot easier to break someone when you’re fucking around with their synapses. Had a fun time figuring out what those scars were.” 

Steve turned a little green and clenched his fists so tightly it felt like he was close to breaking skin. “I’m so sorry.”

Bucky’s lips curled and he shook his head. Almost as soon as the anger and tension had flared between them, it seemed to disappear. “It’s not your fault.” 

An uneasy silence fell between them. “During the war,” Steve said cautiously, “You were my guide. After the serum, the world didn’t make any sense. It was too bright. Too loud. Being near you made me feel...calm. Focused. When I was found, I was offered a new guide, but I wouldn’t take it.” 

Bucky was eerily quiet, staring at him, possibly considering and absorbing what he’d just said. He hoped, at least. It was hard to know when Bucky seemed about as reactive as a sleepwalker.

“If they--Hydra,” fuck, the fact that they’d existed after the war was a hard pill to swallow. “Did the same thing to you, they tried to overwrite whatever senses you already had. That could be part of why it’s so hard for you to remember anything. The details are at odds with, well...you.” 

As frustrating as Tony could be, Steve would have given anything for him to have been there right then, because he had a feeling that he would have been able to explain it a thousand times better. 

Bucky at least didn’t seem angry. Thoughtful, maybe. Contemplative, definitely.  
Or maybe Bucky didn’t remember anything at all and he was seconds away from snapping his neck. It was honestly hard to tell either way. 

The urge to fill the silence crawled underneath Steve’s skin. “Does...Hydra...does Hydra still exist?” Bucky didn’t look great, but he was also, unmistakably alive. If Hydra had captured him, then they wouldn’t have let him go without a fight. 

Bucky looked unimpressed with his analysis. 

“Of course they still exist.”

“Then how...how are you _here_?”

Bucky was definitely angry now--glaring at him so intently that Steve could almost feel the temperature rise in the room. “Because I didn’t want to die.” 

Steve furrowed his brow as he tried to make sense of Bucky’s answer, but from the way that the muscles in Bucky’s face immediately tensed, he was certain that he wasn’t going to get more of an answer out of him than that. 

After another pause--which was definitely way too quiet. Steve had gotten accustomed to hearing Bucky’s heartbeat during the war, and now, well, he couldn’t hear anything at all--Bucky’s expression softened slightly. 

“They were looking for me,” Bucky said. Steve searched his features for a moment, hoping to gain some insight into what had happened to him since his escape from Hydra. 

Bucky furrowed his brow, before his expression smoothed out again into nothing. “Bad men. Hydra, probably.”

“Do you know where they might have taken her?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to tell me where?”

“No.”

Steve raised an eyebrow. “Why not?”

For a brief, strange moment, Bucky slipped into a Brooklyn accent. “Because you always do this. You always get involved. You always get in trouble.” 

Steve pursed his lips. “Will you come with me, then? Keep me out of trouble.” 

Bucky was again, expressionless. Steve wasn’t sure what reaction he was about to get from Bucky, but he didn’t expect the one he got.

“Okay. Let’s find your friend.” 

-

He’d kept lookout for Bucky as he hot-wired a car, feeling a pang of sadness in his chest. Bucky was the one who had taught him to do that during the war, who had always had a knack for pulling apart anything mechanical. 

Steve had to fight to squash the analogy to Bucky himself in his head. 

Bucky had just managed to start the car when Steve realized that he hadn’t asked where they were going--he’d been so in his head about Bucky that he had missed a very critical piece of information. 

“Where are we going?” 

“Białowieża Forest,” Bucky said as he opened the driver’s side door. 

Steve had seen the forest--a tiny little dot on Natasha’s map of Poland. Even if the world before him was unsteady and blurred, the picture of the map in his head wasn’t. He was certain that he could remember the exact route to get there. “I’ll drive.” 

“You’re not driving,” Bucky said resolutely. “You don’t know the area, and besides, your senses have been shot to shit. You’ll probably drive the car straight into a tree.”

It was hard for Steve not to smile a little, because he had done that, during the war, (in his defense, it had been a very small tree), and Bucky and the rest of the Howling Commandos hadn’t let him hear the end of it. 

“Okay, you can drive,” Steve nodded, getting into the passenger side. For a moment, Bucky hesitated--brow furrowing in concentration. Steve watched him curiously, until a few seconds later Bucky was again expressionless and got into the car too. 

The car ride was excruciatingly silent. Steve was aware of exactly how much time passed--the serum had also cursed him with an incredibly accurate internal clock. He hadn’t been able to fully lose himself in something since before the war. He had so many questions that he wanted to ask Bucky--most of which, judging by his uneven, quick-to-anger temper in his apartment--wouldn’t necessarily be well-received. 

So he stayed silent.

Bucky did too. 

It was about an hour and a half before Bucky spoke. “Forest was occupied in ‘41,” Bucky said, eyes trained ahead. Steve nodded, trying not to show his shock at hearing Bucky’s voice. Since receiving the serum, he’d also been cursed with the ability to remember every conversation, everything he read, and everything that happened to him. He definitely remembered hearing about that. 

“Goering wanted to make it into the world’s largest hunting reserve. I remember. You sure she’s here? It’s been a while since 1941.” Steve asked.

Bucky’s lip curled unpleasantly. “It has. But Hydra’s had a base there for decades. If she’s not here, I don’t think that there’s a way to save your friend. I’m sorry.” 

Steve let out a breath, clenching his hands in his lap. “I shouldn’t have let her do this.” 

Bucky’s face was expressionless in the same, eerie way it had been back in his apartment. “That’s always been your problem, hasn’t it?”

Steve raised an eyebrow at him. “What are you talking about?”

“You don’t think about the consequences, ever. You just…” Bucky trailed off, looking some combination of angry and frustrated that felt out of place. “You just never _think._ ”

“What...what don’t I think about?”

Maybe it wasn’t the right thing to say, Steve wasn’t sure. He was never sure if he was being totally honest. But in that moment, curiosity was gnawing at him. 

“I don’t know. I’m just really mad at you for some reason. I don’t know why,” Bucky said weakly, fingers digging into the steering wheel. “Every time I remember you, I’m mad at you.” 

Steve bit his lip. “You were mad at me. A lot. A long time ago. You were mad at me when I told you not to report to the army. When I kept trying to enlist too. And when I found you at the factory.” That was the hardest one for him to understand, but Bucky had always been the type of person to suffer in silence. Bucky had to have known that _something_ had happened to him--even if he hadn’t completely understood it at the time. “That wasn’t even every time…”

He laughed a little, watching Bucky’s expression curiously, hoping that maybe there’d be some recognition there. Bucky, for his part, betrayed nothing. 

Another ten minutes passed before Bucky spoke again. 

“They told me you were dead.”

“What?”

“Hydra, they...they fucked around with my brain a lot, but I remember, they kept telling me that you were dead. Waiting to see how I would react. It wasn’t until they were convinced that I didn’t care that they stopped.”

Steve furrowed his brow. “Why?”

Bucky sighed--a heavy sigh that bordered on irritation, and Steve felt that same flare of warmth in the car that he had when Bucky had gotten angry with him in his apartment. “Sometimes, I remember thinking, I might die, but at least Steve is safe. Then they told me...you were not safe. That you were dead. And it made me angry. Some days, I forget your name. I’m not as good with it as I am with mine, but, when I remember it, I’m mad. I’m so mad.” 

“I’m sorry.”

It was all Steve _could_ say, his throat felt tight and he was certain that he was about to cry for the first goddamn time since 1937. 

“I don’t know why you’re sorry,” Bucky said flatly, and that was almost worse than Bucky outright throwing his apology back in his face. 

“Because I thought you were dead. But I should have--I _knew_ something had happened. I should have pushed for the SSR to run more tests, I should have done _something_.” Steve clenched his hands hard, very much aware of the fact that he could have put a hole straight through the dashboard without a lot of effort. 

Bucky’s expression softened again. “Real smart. Then we both could have died, Steve,” and the raw honesty was what stunned Steve into silence. 

-

Steve didn’t know what he’d been expecting when Bucky had told him where they were going, but he definitely hadn’t expected it to be full of _tourists_.

“Are you sure this is the right place?” Steve asked, because even after the explosion in the square, it felt ridiculous to think that Hydra would be ballsy enough to operate a base so close to so many people who could potentially discover it. 

“They’re everywhere,” Bucky murmured under his breath. “They hide in plain sight.” 

The park was far too bright and colorful and noisy for Steve to feel like he could walk straight. He reached out and grabbed Bucky’s arm--an old instinct from the war--and gave him an apologetic look. 

Holding Bucky didn’t have the same calming effect that it used to, but it still helped. It still felt like an anchor.

“What are you doing?” Bucky hissed under his breath.

“Trying not to draw attention to the fact that I can’t really walk right now,” Steve murmured back. “But if you’d prefer that I stumble off and fall over a four hundred year old tree or something, then feel free to tell me to let go.” 

Bucky huffed and continued forward, with Steve hanging off of his arm. “You are completely ridiculous,” he said, and damn, if Steve didn’t covet that remark. 

-

He wasn’t sure how long they’d been walking in the forest, but at some point, they’d turned off of the path that tourists used, and went deeper into an overgrown patch of trees. 

“It’s down here,” Bucky said, kicking a tree that must have been hundreds of years old with his foot. It made Steve think of the way that Hydra and the Nazis had coveted ancient artifacts and artistic masterpieces during the war. They wanted their hands on anything rare and they didn’t care what it was or who they hurt trying to get it. In a way, the forest felt no different than those artifacts. 

Bucky let go of him for a brief moment, shoving the log out of the way with a surprising amount of strength. For a moment, Steve could feel the way that his muscles stretched and contracted as he pushed it. 

It was the first time that link between them--the one that had told him about the serum in Bucky’s veins during the war--had lit up again, a connection that he’d honestly begun to wonder if it had been close to severing completely.

Bucky gave him a curious look, and Steve looked away almost immediately. “Just...help me down if you don’t want to go alone,” Steve said. Bucky nodded, wrapping his hand around Steve’s arm and leading him down into the bunker, edges of that same calmness and focus coming back to him for a fleeting moment. 

Steve went down into the bunker expecting a fight. After the blast in the square and Natasha’s kidnapping, he was certain that whoever had taken her wouldn’t give her up so easily. He’d become even more convinced of that fact when Bucky had told him that Hydra was still looking for him.

But to his surprise--as hard as it was to see when his senses made him feel like the world in front of him was watery and blurred--Natasha was...fine. 

There were several men laying at her feet, broken and bloody, and slumped in unnatural positions. When Natasha spotted them, she fixed them with a too-wide grin. 

“Nice of you to drop by,” Natasha murmured, continuing to grin even as her head lolled to one side. “I was beginning to think that you might have forgotten about lil old me.” 

Steve let out a nervous laugh, clinging to Bucky as he undid Natasha’s restraints. 

Natasha definitely looked a little woozy--Steve couldn’t stop himself from feeling incredibly guilty that she had gotten caught up in his business--but she regarded Bucky with something between amusement, wariness, and awe. 

Then she said something to Bucky in very rapid Russian.

Which, to Steve’s surprise, Bucky returned in equally fluent Russian.

And back and forth they went until Bucky said something that made Natasha burst out laughing. 

Steve raised an eyebrow. The amount of Russian that he’d learned in the war hadn’t prepared him for this. “Were you just talking about me?” 

“See?” Bucky said. “He thinks everything is about him.” 

-

The apartment was cramped with the three of them. Natasha had been given space on the mattress, and Steve and Bucky had fought over who would get the armchair until Bucky played the trump card, “You’re both guests here.” 

That night, as Natasha slept, he and Bucky engaged in what had to be the longest and most ridiculous staring contest they’d ever had in complete silence. 

It was at about 3:43am that Steve got fed up waiting for Bucky to say something. 

“I missed you.” 

Bucky shifted uncomfortably. “I feel like I keep having to tell you that the person you missed is gone.” 

“I don’t believe that.” 

Bucky pursed his lips. “I remember things about the war. About you. About us. Sometimes.” 

“Buck, the last thing I want is to pressure you into doing something you don’t want to do,” Steve whispered, glancing over at Natasha, who rolled over onto her side. “All I’m telling you right now is that I missed you.”

Bucky considered this for a moment. “Sometimes I miss things too.” 

“Like what?”

“Things like...having a home. Things. I don’t know. They don’t always have names.” 

Steve smiled a little in the darkness. “Yeah, me too.” 

-

In the morning, Natasha was thankfully a lot more alert, and didn’t have any critical injuries, aside from some bruises from the blast in the square. 

“We need to get back to New York,” Natasha said as she laced up her boots. “Fury will want a debrief after the incident at the base, if it hasn’t gotten back to him already.” 

Perhaps it was completely naive of him, but Steve couldn’t stop himself from turning to look at Bucky, reaching out to hold his hands. “Are you going to come with us?” 

Bucky considered Steve for a moment, before he shook his head. 

“I can’t go with you,” Bucky pulled his hands out of Steve’s grasp. “I can’t. You and Romanovna--you both know what I did. They’ll lock me up. And maybe they should. I know what I did.” 

Bucky met his gaze head on, as if to demonstrate his culpability, but the longer that Steve looked at him, the more he could see that there was no flicker of recognition behind his eyes. 

“You don’t remember,” Steve murmured. “You don’t remember, do you?”

Bucky let out a sigh and shook his head. “I remember a lot of things. Flashes, mostly. I’ve been trying to make sense of them for months. Some things I think I’ve been able to untangle in my head, and, well, I don’t have days where I can’t remember my name anymore. But that stuff? The _bad_ stuff? That I don’t remember. Any of it.” 

Steve glanced over at Natasha. Natasha pursed her lips, deep in thought. “It’ll take some time, Rogers. JFK was in that file.”

“What does she mean, time?”

Steve reached for Bucky’s hand and squeezed it. “It means that I’m going to do whatever it takes to make sure that you can get home. If that’s what you want. But for now, again, if you want, I’d like to stay with you. Government won’t take you in if it’ll piss off Captain America.” 

To his surprise, Bucky grinned a little. “Did you…” he hesitated in the same way that he had when they were driving across the country together. Like he was grasping desperately for something just out of reach. 

“...keep the outfit?”

Natasha looked between the two of them, a small smile on her features. “Fury will hate this. Fuck, the _president_ will hate this.” 

“I’ve always wanted to piss off the president.” 

Bucky snorted. 

Steve smiled at him. 

“Just, don’t drop completely off the grid, Rogers, alright? I’d like to be able to find you again if I need to.” 

Steve nodded, standing up a little bit straighter. “Of course.” 

“Then for now,” Natasha said, “I think this is goodbye.”

Natasha held out her hand for a handshake, but Steve pulled her in for a hug. After a moment’s surprise, Natasha smiled gently and pulled away. 

“I’ll be in touch.” 

-

Of course, Bucky did try to make him go home. 

“You should go home,” Bucky said, as soon as Natasha left. “Life on the run isn’t a good life for Captain America.”

“It’s a good thing that I’m not Captain America, then, right?”

An hour later, Bucky said, “Your senses must be shot to shit without a proper guide. You should go home.” 

“I’ll get over it,” Steve said, and although he’d never managed it before, he supposed that now was as good a time as any to try and manage without a guide. 

“I don’t remember you.”

“Well, now you’re just grasping at straws, Buck.” 

He glanced over at Bucky and furrowed his brow. Bucky could definitely be hard to read, vacillating quickly from remembering bits and pieces of the past to insisting that he didn’t remember anything at all. 

He closed the distance between them, and held Bucky’s hand gently. “I was serious about what I said before. I’m not trying to pressure you into anything. But you have to know that you’re an important person to me, Buck. And however you’re important to me, that doesn’t matter. Whatever way I can love you, I will love you.” 

Bucky wrinkled his nose a little, before smiling, “You were always hard to get rid of.”

Steve smiled back a little. “Yeah, so I’ve been told.” 

“You know, if there are more...bad men, out there. More Hydra members are probably looking for me, you’ll be in danger too.”

Steve shook his head. “Whatever happens, we’ll face it together.”

“Together?” 

“Together.”

**Author's Note:**

> when thoughts keep drifting (as walls keep shifting)  
> Creator(s): plutosrose  
> Card number: 012  
> Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29518131  
> Square filled: A5, Blind  
> Rating: T  
> Archive warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply  
> Major tags: Non-Consensual Surgery Mention, Winter Soldier Torture Mention, Memory Problems, Alternate Universe - Sentinels & Guides, Sensory Overload  
> Summary:
> 
> Bucky considered this for a moment. “Sometimes I miss things too.” 
> 
> “Like what?”
> 
> “Things like...having a home. Things. I don’t know. They don’t always have names.” 
> 
> Steve smiled a little in the darkness. “Yeah, me too.” 
> 
> Word count: 4,285


End file.
